The Dark Tower

John thought it over. He touched the cross he wore now and would wear until his death in the year of 1989—the cross given to Roland by an old woman in a forgotten town. He would touch it just that way in the years ahead when contemplating some big decision (the biggest might have been the one to sever Tet’s connection with IBM, a company that had shown an ever-increasing willingness to do business with North Central Positronics) or preparing for some covert action (the firebombing of Sombra Enterprises in New Delhi, for instance, in the year before he died). The cross spoke to Moses Carver and never spoke again in Cullum’s presence no matter how much he blew on it, but sometimes, drifting to sleep with his hand clasped around it, he would think: ’Tis a sigul. ’Tis a sigul, dear—something that came from another world.

If he had regrets toward the end (other than about some of the tricks, which were filthy indeed and cost more than one man his life), it was that he never got a chance to visit the world on the other side, which he glimpsed one stormy evening on Turtleback Lane in the town of Lovell. From time to time Roland’s sigul sent him dreams of a field filled with roses, and a sooty-black tower. Sometimes he was visited by terrible visions of two crimson eyes, floating unattached to any body and relentlessly scanning the horizon. Sometimes there were dreams in which he heard the sound of a man relentlessly winding his horn. From these latter dreams he would awake with tears on his cheeks, those of longing and loss and love. He would awake with his hand closed around the cross, thinking I denied Discordia and regret nothing; I have spat into the bodiless eyes of the Crimson King and rejoice; I threw my lot with the gunslinger’s ka-tet and the White and never once questioned the choice.

Yet for all that he wished he could have walked out, just once, into that other land: the one beyond the door.

Now he said: “You boys want all the right things. I can’t put it any clearer than that. I believe you.” He hesitated. “I believe in you. What I see in your eyes is true.”

Eddie thought he was done, and then Cullum grinned like a boy.

“Also it ’pears to me you’re offerin the keys to one humongous great engine.” Engyne. “Who wouldn’t want to turn it on, and see what it does?”

“Are you scared?” Roland asked.

John Cullum considered the question, then nodded. “Ayuh,” he said.

Roland nodded. “Good,” he said.

SEVEN

They drove back up to Turtleback Lane in Cullum’s car beneath a black, boiling sky. Although this was the height of the summer season and most of the cottages on Kezar were probably occupied, they saw not a single car moving in either direction. All the boats on the lake had long since run for cover.

“Said I had somethin else for ya,” John said, and went to the back of his truck, where there was a steel lockbox snugged up against the cab. Now the wind had begun to blow. It swirled his scanty fluff of white hair around his head. He ran a combination, popped a padlock, and swung back the lockbox’s lid. From inside he brought out two dusty bags the wanderers knew well. One looked almost new compared to the other, which was the scuffed no-color of desert dust and laced its long length with rawhide.

“Our gunna!” Eddie cried, so delighted—and so amazed—that the words almost came out in a scream. “How in the name of hell—?”

John offered them a smile that augured well for his future as a dirty trickster: bemused on the surface, sly beneath. “Nice surprise, ain’t it? Thought so m’self. I went back to get a look at Chip’s store—what ’us left of it—while there was still a lot of confusion. People runnin hither, thither, and yon is what I mean to say; coverin bodies, stringin that yella tape, takin pitchers. Somebody’d put those bags off to one side and they looked just a dight lonely, so I . . .” He shrugged one bony shoulder. “I scooped em up.”

“This would have been while we were visiting with Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau in their rented cabin,” Eddie said. “After you went back home, supposedly to pack for Vermont. Is that right?” He was stroking the side of his bag. He knew that smooth surface very well; hadn’t he shot the deer it had come from and scraped off the hair with Roland’s knife and stitched the hide himself, with Susannah to help him? Not long after the great robot bear Shardik had almost unzipped Eddie’s guts, that had been. Sometime in the last century, it seemed.

“Yuh,” Cullum said, and when the old fellow’s smile sweetened, Eddie’s last doubts about him departed. They had found the right man for this world. Say true and thank Gan big-big.

“Strap on your gun, Eddie,” Roland said, holding out the revolver with the worn sandalwood grips.